Sermons (Page 8)
Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
Today’s gospel reading is a tough one. We heard that Jesus was in a foreign land with his disciples when a foreign woman interrupted. Now, the rest of the interaction baffles most scholars. Ok, maybe it doesn’t baffle as much as the interpretations diverge…
The Feast of Mary, Mother of Our Lord
Sometimes I think we, as modern day Lutherans, are scared of Mary. Maybe not scared in the “creature lurking in the shadows to ambush us” type of scared. But more…I think we often don’t know what to do with her, we’re not really sure what the “correct” way to feel about her is and that uncertainty makes us anxious and so we cover that anxiety by…kind of trying to say as little about her as possible, outside of Christmastime…
Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
I got roped into being the church acolyte a lot as a child, we’re talking like three times a month for most of middle school. We did the “everyone come forward and kneel/stand around the altar rails and the pastor walks around passing bread out, and a communion assistant trails behind with the wine and juice” style of distribution. One of the acolyte’s jobs was to follow right next to the pastor and be ready. Because every time he got to a child who hadn’t had their first communion yet, he would, no warning, thrust the plate of bread in my general direction, and I had to grab it quickly because he’d just drop it, so I always was paying real close attention to this part. And what happened next would be exactly identical every time. He’d kneel in front of the child, grin and look them in the eyes and trace the sign of the cross on their forehead as he called them by name and then said “At your baptism, we marked you with the sign of the cross and that makes you a child of God forever, and no one can take that from you. I love you and I’m so glad you’re in church today.” His facial expression, pacing, cadence, volume, tone, pause, every single part would be exactly the same every single time. The only part that differed was the child’s name, and even that he’d keep as identical as possible every single week. And when there were two or three or five children all lined up in a row, each child would get the same message individually one after another…